As recently publicised Ofcom are proposing some changes to the Amateur Licence in the UK. While there is the possibility (or from some recent surveys even the likliehood) that Scotland will vote this month to leave the UK and become an independant entity, perhaps Ofcom should await this result before looking at changing the regs. Then again, one proposed change - to drop the country identifier, may be related to the vote. Perhaps should Scotland become independant it may be allowed to take the GM prefix with it for Amateur Radio and this would not work well if the remaining UK regs, managed by the England based Ofcom, continued to say add in the M when going north. Conspirary theory? Perhaps.
In any case, should Scotland become independant, will this affect the SOTA Summit classifications? If the independant Scotland gets the GM prefix, then I guess not. Perhaps the group controlling AR in an Independant Scotland might consider moving away from the (IMHO) confusing GM, MM and 2M callsign IDs to just having GM calls again as they will have sufficient numbers and letters available to be able to implement all calls under just GM (perhaps similar to how Australia uses different letters to indicate Foundation (F & 4 letters), Intermediate (called Standard in VK) (H, L, M, N, P, V, three letters), Advanced, all remaining 2 and 3 letter combinations. Not that this system is particularly clear either.
An independant Scotland does bring up a lot of questions, not only in Amateur Radio of course. I am not expressing an opinion either way but I hope Scotland stays part of the Commonwealth otherwise the Royal Famiy may have some issues with their winter holiday retreat being outside of the commonwealth!
73 Ed, G8GLM / VK2JI / DD5LP.